Rogers Xfinity Upgrade Experience

FrathosCAN · 2025-03-29T21:30:38+00:00

Hello all, I thought I’d share my experience upgrading from Rogers legacy Internet & STB to Xfinity products. My Rogers NextBox 4K PVR STB has become unreliable since Dec 2024 (recordings were short or playback on full recordings stopped randomly prematurely) so I bit the bullet on Friday and requested the upgrade to the newer Xfinity service. I was pleasantly surprised when the package arrived the next day by Purolator as I wasn’t expecting it until Monday if sent by Canada Post. I tried setting up the new XB7 gateway with my Samsung Tab S9 FE tablet & the Xfinity app but it got stuck because it had no internet connectivity after I disconnected the legacy cable modem from my ASUS GT-AC5300 router and plugged into the XB7 instead. No problem I thought, I’ll just connect via my Desktop PC & configure the new XB7 WiFi that way & internet access was restored to PC & tablet. The Xfinity app on the tablet still insisted on activating the XB7 WiFi even after uninstalling & reinstalling the app. Fine, I told it to use the same WiFi credentials that I set via PC and it finally completed the process to allow me to view the XB7 via the app. I elected to continue using my ASUS router so I wouldn’t have to go through the laborious process of reconfiguring my 4 LIFX WiFi lights so I put XB7 into Bridge mode after disabling the 2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz radios. Next I setup the XI6 STB to connect to my ASUS routers second 5 Ghz radio. Typing using the remote was annoying (Arrow buttons are very stiff & hard to use) but it got the job done. The STB connected and displayed TVOntario Ch2 & holy cow did that look so much better than the old NextBox video quality. All channels in fact looked sharper & I noticed that now some channels were even 4K (eg some Sport channels). This morning I noticed while watching CP24 that there were some audio glitches and the picture quality had degraded. I switched channels to TVOntario & back to CP24 & it went back to normal. I then decided that if picture degradation was due to WiFi congestion issues in my MDU then I’d try using the wired ethernet connection instead to try and avoid that issue in future. That worked initially until I checked my router & noticed it had dedicated ports that can be assigned which I didn’t plug into & that STB was only connecting at 100 Mbps. I replaced the ethernet cable with a Cat 5e cable & STB remained at 100 Mbps no matter which port I plugged into on my router so I guess that’s what it’s going to use. I wanted to see 1 Gbps connection because I noticed WiFi was using up to 173 Mbps Up/Down throughput. Next I looked at my router IPTV settings and changed it to use Port 5 & 6 instead of 1 & 2 (the default) which are the gaming prioritized ports for my game console & desktop PC. The router rebooted and after a ca 3 minute wait (this happened repeatedly with each reboot - XB7 DHCP seems slow to respond) my PC had functional internet again while the XI6 stopped using ethernet connected to Port 5 & switched back to WiFi instead despite the ethernet socket status LED on back of XI6 flashing to show Port was active). Several hours later after much Googling, I wasn’t able to find out any VLAN specific settings compatible with XI6 that I could apply to the IPTV tab in the ASUS router and ultimately had to change from the plan to use Port 5 or 6 for the XI6 & my Samsung S95B (it didn’t like the router change either) so I switched the XI6 to use Port 3 instead & Samsung TV to Port 7 following which they both were able to work properly again using their ethernet connected ports. I’m guessing that there is some issue with Multicasting being disabled (it was originally enabled but went disabled with no way to change again) when ASUS router has Port 5&6 set as IPTV port that affects the STB & TV from being able to get internet services they require via those ports (they worked when setting was left at 1&2). Thankfully I don’t have additional devices that need those 2 ports so I guess I’ll just have to leave them empty as I don’t want the default 1&2 setting to affect my gaming console & PC gaming prioritization usage now that I have a STB that uses IPTV.

mozerd

Donoreo
Indeed you did … my apology for not mentioning your sage advice earlier …

Donoreo

mozerd No problem, I am sure it was lost among the posts, that happens.

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